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Naked Mole Rats Defy Mortality Mathematics (discovermagazine.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Naked mole rats are adorably ugly creatures that challenge what we think we know about aging. Naked mole rats can live to be 30 years old. Further, female mole rats show no signs of menopause, and remain highly fertile even into their final years of life. Neurogenesis in naked mole rats continues over two decades, and their hearts and bones don't seem to change significantly over time. They rarely get cancer. Hell, they can even live up to 18 minutes utterly deprived of oxygen.

[...] At Google's biotech company, Calico, in San Francisco, California, biologist Rochelle Buffenstein is looking to the naked survivors to unlock their secrets of aging. Buffenstein says naked mole rats violate to the Gompertz-Makeham law, and she has over 3,000 data points to back her conclusion. After reaching adulthood six months into their lives, a naked mole rat's mortality risk remained the same for the rest of its days her analysis revealed. Rather than grow exponentially, a naked mole rat's risk of death on any given day, no matter their point in life, hovered around 1 in 10,000. Surprisingly, their mortality risk even fell a little when they grew very old. In this sense, Buffenstein writes, naked mole rats have established themselves as "a non-aging mammal. This life-history trend is unprecedented for mammals," Buffenstein and colleagues wrote in a study published recently in the journal eLife.

5 of 320 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm! by Mikkeles · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe hanging out in your mom's basement in the dark is a successful long-life strategy>

    --
    Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
  2. Nudity by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Funny

    The secret to a longer life is nudity.

    Where is my science grant to study people in nudist colonies?

    --
    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    1. Re:Nudity by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      I imagine after not too long you and the below ground nudists will *wish* for a quick death.

      Or they'll evolve into Morlocks and farm your Eloi ass.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  3. Re:Absence of Solar Radiation? by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No solar radiation in their normal habitat is the biggest environmental factor.

    There are plenty of other underground species that don't show this neoteny. And some that do, like axolotls, but without a greatly increased life span.

  4. Re:Google by cayenne8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Tell that to Steve Jobs.

    Steve had the money AND the medical advice to try to help extend his life.

    However HE made the choice to ignore them and try more holistic types of tx...and waited too long to try more proven medical tx.

    He could likely still be alive if he'd listened to the original medical tx advice.

    Not that other sources and types of medicine aren't valuable, I believe they are, but when it comes to cancer, you need to try the prevailing medical recommendations there, you don't fuck with the big "C"...

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........